“How did you even find out?” Luka was wide-eyed.
“He’s got powers,” Jared fake-whispered to Luka.
“I know!” Luka whispered back.
Nate’s smile twitched again. “Never mind how I found out. Now, Jared, I want you to give Luka his money back.”
Jared rooted in his pocket and pulled out the handful of coins, offering them to Luka palm up. Luka refused to even look at the money, and in a dramatic move he sat on his hands.
“But I don’t want the money, I want Jared to stay, because when you see him you’re smiling more, and you even whistled this morning. Please let him stay, Dad, please don’t let him go. I promise to do all my homework.”
“Luka…” Nate sounded anguished.
Jared leapt in to defuse the emotional time bomb. “I’m not going anywhere, buddy,” he said, and placed the coins on the table. “I’m staying for free.” He then hugged Luka and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “Your dad wants me to stay.”
“I do.”
That called for a group hug, and the hugs lasted a very long time.
Movie night ended with Luka falling asleep sprawled over the two of them, and it was Jared who ended up carrying him to bed. Luka woke once, startled, staring up at Jared, and then relaxing. “He’s staying,” he murmured to his pillow, and then curled on his side.
Jared’s chest tightened. “Love this kid,” he whispered in the dark, and searched for Nate’s hand, tugging him in to steal the tiniest of kisses. Love his dad, too.
“I wish you could stay tonight,” Nate said after they shut Luka’s door.
“The car is picking me up at five for the booking.”
“What is it this time? Man, woman?”
Jared was still hung up on the personal revelation that he was falling in love with Nate. “Huh?”
“Did a man or a woman book you?”
“Businesswoman, I’ve worked for her before, she’s fascinating.”
“Have fun.”
“I will, the food is always excellent, and they are a… oh.” He finally got a good look at Nate’s expression, which was closed and just this side of worried. “I’d rather be staying the night here, then waking up to you, then eating pancakes and watching TV with Luka.”
“Yeah?”
Jared did all he could to kiss the worries away. “It’s just a job. I’ll come straight back on Sunday and tell you all about it.”
“Maybe you could… nah, it’s okay.”
“Maybe I could what?”
“I don’t know… you could call me when you’re away? Because I’ll be missing your face, and I think I already miss your voice. Only if you want.”
Oh yeah, I’m well on the way to being in love.
“And then everything went to shit.” Jared paused for a moment and shook his head. He was listing the latest series of disasters on his Bryant & Waites booking and he loved that Nate was so invested.
Nate chuckled and the sound sent shivers down Jared’s spine. He’d missed Nate’s voice as well, and was so lost in the sexy timbre of it, and the way he laughed, and the sense memory of how he hugged, and the sex…
Yeah, the sex was hot. Off the charts hot. Addictive even.
“You have to tell me everything,” Nate said, and Jared heard him moving, the sound of the refrigerator opening and shutting, then an exhalation as he sat on the sofa. Jared could imagine Nate doing all these things, and knew every single expression, and the steps he would take.
Not that he’d been staring at Nate every moment he got. Liar.
Today’s Bryant & Waites booking had started off so well. Jared had chosen the perfect suit, a crisp white shirt, a ruby-red tie, and after the appropriate amount of primping and messing about in the bathroom he looked good if he said so himself. Even Nate agreed after Jared had sent him a whole raft of photos.
“I was holding my own, discussing the psychology of sales with these execs, and my date gave a rousing speech about how ninety-nine percent wasn’t a hundred, or something like that. I’m not exactly sure what she said because I was thinking about you the whole time.”
“You were?” Why did Nate sound so surprised? They were dating officially, and even though their time alone had been tight what with Jared’s studying, the bar, and dates where Luka was with them, they’d already had some amazing moments.
“Are you telling me you don’t think about me?” Jared deadpanned, which made Nate laugh again.
“Wasn’t it me who asked you to call?”
“True that. Anyway, if you’re really interested in how it all went to shit, then Jeanette finished her keynote, and I was mingling.”
“Uh oh.”
“Why uh oh?”
“Mingling sounds ominous.”
“To be fair mingling is pretty innocent and it didn’t start in any kind of ominous way, but then I met Carl with his cat Marmalade.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. One of the execs actually took their cat to the event?”
“No, it was more like, Marmalade had just had results back from tests for blah blah blah, something, blah, and was fine. Carl got upset is all, and I stood with him while he worked the emotions through his system, y’know.”
“So far so good.”
“Oh, did Luka get my text about the dinosaur thing? The one at the museum?”
“Yes he did. Stop changing the subject.”
“Only there’s this guided tour and we—”
“Jared…”
“Well, both of us leaning on the same temporary table probably wasn’t a good idea, but it wasn’t as if we knew the table would break. But it did, and that meant that me, Jeanette, and Carl were close to the chocolate fountain when it lost its equilibrium, which ended up with all three of us wrestling in the slippery chocolate.” He paused to allow Nate to finish laughing. “I think it should be a thing.”
“What? You and strangers wrestling in chocolate?”
“No, you and me wrestling in chocolate.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly, and now I’ve thought of that, I’m all hard while being completely on my own in this gorgeous room.”
“Hang on, because I’m taking this into the bedroom,”
